Jay Currie

In the comments at RightGirl’s highly entertaining blog Linda from PumpkinWatch provides this rather wonderful quote from the old trickster himself, Malcolm Muggeridge:

Back in 1977 Malcolm Muggeridge had this to say (in his book Christ and the Media):

“There is something, to me, very sinister about this emergence of a weird kind of conformity, or orthodoxy, particularly among the people who operate the media, so that you can tell in advance exactly what they will say and think about anything. It is true that so far they have not got an Inquisition to enforce their orthodoxy, but they do have ways of enforcing it which make the old thumbscrews and racks seem quite paltry.”
pumpkin patch via rightgirl

I find this apposite in light of the Zerb’s inability to deal with positions and facts which contradict her own – and her colleague’s orthodoxy.

The precipitous decline in newspaper readership (though not, to be fair, the Star’s), the falling off of television viewing, the rise of blogs as ginger groups for both left (love that blackface Lieberman Jane...classy) and right, all reflect the fact the great and the good in the media biz have entirely lost the thread.

When I – along with many other bloggers – raised the question of Hezbollah’s using the dead kids at Qana for a photo-op the MSM reaction, exemplified by the Zerb, was to rush to prop up the work of the Hezbollah led photogs. Just as when Dan Rather tried to pass off forged documents, the reaction was to try and save Dan.

This will kill MSM dead.

The right reaction would have been to say, “Wow…that is a pretty big claim. Let me find out what the facts of the matter are.” Antonia is, after all, the media critic of the largest paper in Canada. Reuters would take her call. then get in there and dig.

Could be that the bloggers are all talking through our hats. But it could also be that Hezbollah is using those poor dead babies for a photo op. A real media critic, a real media, would have dug and not stopped digging until the truth will out. (And Robert Fisk doesn’t actually count.)

Ten years ago this sort of orthodox, media defensiveness might be met with a few, easily forgotten, letters to the editor: now, bloggers have the same access as the MSM has. What they don’t have is the fear of heresy which drives the MSM.

The free ride is over.